(A longer and more scholarly version of this piece appears in an academic collection, Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century.)

My interest in crime fiction surely informed my editorship of The Cambridge History of the American Novel, which showcases many of the connections between classic literature and popular genres. When that book came under attack from a conservative commentator who described it as the work of “barbarians,” I published this paraliptic defense.

And here’s an un-appreciation of the popular writer J.D. Salinger on the occasion of his death in 2010. In retrospect, my timing here was a mistake; Salinger’s admirers deserved their time. I still hold to the arguments I made, though.

I happened upon Theodore Dreiser as a freshman in college when I made the mistake of borrowing a copy of An American Tragedy from a classmate at a point in the term when I could ill spare the time to read an 800-page book. The novel hooked me anyway, and years later I went on to write a handful of articles and coedit a book on Dreiser.

This 2012 essay on The Financier is my first writing on Dreiser for general audiences. The story, of an investment banker who gambles with public money for personal gain, has a certain resonance in today’s world. Appropriately for a piece on a business novel, it appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

I wrote the first essay in this cluster right after the events of September 11th. The second is a kind of a sequel, written a few years later. Both are concerned with the corruption of language by politics.

I’ve long enjoyed the writing of Oliver Sacks, and have wondered what makes it so oddly compelling. In addition to these two articles, I wrote another one on Sacks in 2002. (It appears in a volume called Disability Studies, published by MLA Press.)

Most recently, I was able to catch up with Sacks for this interview (2010).

Much of my writing about Sacks touches in some way on the subject of disability. Here’s a related article that was also the subject of an online colloquy sponsored by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which published it in 1999. You can reach the article here:

A physics professor friend suggested in 2002 that I look into the case of a Bell Labs physicist whose results were a little too perfect. The more I saw, the more interesting the case looked, until I dropped everything and started digging as deeply and widely into it as I could. The result was an article that appeared shortly before an appointed panel formally accused the scientist of fraud:

The research for this article on Woody Guthrie didn’t quite take me from California to the New York Island, but it came close: I roamed and rambled from Brooklyn to Oklahoma, and had a thoroughly great time doing so. The piece appeared near the end of Guthrie’s 2012 centennial year.

The poor prospects for academic employment are only one of many pressures on graduate students. What should teachers do when students have trouble finishing? I considered that question in a two-part series on struggling graduate students that appeared in fall, 2010:

Professors are taught that the academic career is comprised of a combination of research, teaching, and service—but where did that tricolon come from, and why? I fell into a rabbit hole in search of the answer (especially the origins of the disrespected “service” piece) and emerged in 2016 with University Service: The History of an Idea.

Also in November, I wrote this essay in Inside Higher Ed in response to a disagreement with the activist Marc Bousquet. (We’ve communicated since and agree that our approaches to reform are complementary.)

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When it’s publish or perish, exactly how should “publish” work? Here’s a 2002 report on what one professor did:

Professors decide what gets published, who gets grant money, and who gets tenure through a peer review process that allows the judge to be anonymous while the petitioner stands exposed. This has never seemed fair to me, so I wrote this column in protest in 2005:

Academic fields need good public relations and periodic self-evaluation to stay well-nourished and sound. This column looks at the state of American studies through a landmark 2002 encyclopedia that attempts to sum it up: